Saturday, June 23, 2012

How to Make Your Dog Eat Artichokes

If you want your dog to eat artichokes, you must first have a dog who:
is really weird
and another dog who
is monumentally greedy and who absolutely cannot bear to see someone else getting something unless she's getting it too.

Our little pit bull, Sid, fell into the first category. She ate all sorts of strange things. She liked pretty much any kind of fruit. Grapes were a favorite. But she would also taste, and often eat, things that were totally unexpected.

I can't remember why we put a plate of artichoke leaves in front of her (We had already eaten all the soft part). Maybe it was just an experiment to see whether she'd eat them. She did.

Faun, who fell firmly into the greedy and envious category, came rushing up to demand her share. Since we had a second plate of artichoke leaves, we put it in front of her.

She hated them. She almost choked on them. She gagged on every bite, all the while furtively glancing over to confirm that Sid was really eating this horrible stuff.

The next time we had artichokes for lunch, we offered them to the dogs again. This time, Sid had come to the sensible conclusion that spiky artichoke leaves weren't dog food, so she didn't eat them. Faun, on the other hand, ate every single leaf once again. It took her a long time, and her torment was, if anything, even more palpable than before--but rather than run the risk that Sid might get them, she cleaned her plate.

We took pity on Faun after that and never asked her to eat artichokes again.